Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2004),
pp.184-191, October 2004.

AUTOMATIC DRUM SOUND DESCRIPTION FOR REAL-WORLD MUSICUSING TEMPLATE ADAPTATION AND MATCHING METHODS
Kazuyoshi Yoshii†
Masataka Goto‡
Hiroshi G. Okuno††
Department of Intelligence Science and Technology
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan‡
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
ABSTRACTThis paper presents an automatic description system ofdrum sounds for real-world musical audio signals. Our
system can represent onset times and names of drumsby means of drum descriptors defined in the context of
MPEG-7. For their automatic description, drum sounds
must be identified in such polyphonic signals. The problem is that acoustic features of drum sounds vary witheach musical piece and precise templates for them cannot be prepared in advance. To solve this problem, we
propose new template-adaptation and template-matching
methods. The former method adapts a single seed template prepared for each kind of drums to the corresponding
drum sound appearing in an actual musical piece. The latter method then can detect all the onsets of each drum byusing the corresponding adapted template. The onsets ofbass and snare drums in any piece can thus be identified.
Experimental results showed that the accuracy of identifying bass and snare drums in popular music was about
90%. Finally, we define drum descriptors in the MPEG-7
format and demonstrate an example of the automatic drumsound description for a piece of popular music.
keywords: automatic description, polyphonic music,
drum sounds, template-adaptation, template-matching
1. INTRODUCTION
The automatic description of contents of music is an important subject to realize more convenient music information retrieval. Today, audio editing, music composing
and digital distribution of music are very popular because
technological advances with respect to computers and theInternet are remarkable. However, we have a few efficient
ways to retrieve our favorite musical pieces from hugemusic databases (i.e., exploration is limited to artist-basedor title-based queries). In these backgrounds, many studies have addressed the content-based music information
retrieval by describing music contents [4, 12, 18].
In this paper, we discuss an automatic description system of drum sounds. We aim at symbolically representPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies
are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.
c 2004 Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

ing onset times and names of drums by means of drum
descriptors defined in the context of MPEG-7. MPEG7 is a standardization to describe contents of multimedia.
Gómez et al. [4] and Peeters et al. [18] designed instrument descriptors in the MPEG-7 format and claimed theirimportance in music information retrieval. Kitahara etal. [12] discussed the identification of harmonic sounds toautomatically describe names of instruments by using instrument descriptors. However, no research has addressed
the automatic drum sound description.
Because drums play an important role in contemporary music, the drum sound description is necessary to accurately extract various features of music that are usefulfor music information retrieval (e.g., rhythm, tempo, beat,meter and periodicity). Previous researches, however, extracted those features by numerical analysis, not considering symbolic information with respect to drum performances [9, 15, 16, 20]. Some researches, for example,
addressed a genre classification problem [1, 21]. Characteristic or typical drum patterns are different among genres (e.g, rock-style, jazz-style or techno-style). Therefore,
symbolic information of drum sounds provides good clues
for the genre classification. In addition, it distributes tomusic information retrieval which considers users’ preferences to music because drum patterns are closely related
to a mood of a musical piece [13].
It is required for the automatic drum sound description
to identify drum sounds in real-world CD recordings. To
identify instrument sounds with the harmonic structure,
several methods have been proposed [2, 14]. Those methods assuming the harmonic structure, however, cannot beapplied to drum sounds. Some researches addressed thedrum sound identification for solo tones [8, 10, 11] or synthesized signals by MIDI [3, 5, 17]. Others discussed theextraction of drum tracks, but did not mention the identification [22]. The accurate drum sound identification forreal-world polyphonic music is still difficult problem because it is impossible to prepare, in advance, all kinds ofdrum sounds appearing in various musical pieces.
To identify drum sounds, we propose new template
adaptation and matching methods:• The template-adaptation method uses templatemodels of the power spectrum of drum sounds. The
advantage of our method is that only one templatemodel called “seed template” is necessary for eachmusicalaudio signal

Rough-Onset-Detection

P19

frequency

P1
…

power

P30

P31

P47

…

…

Template-Refinement

median

TS
T0

P62
…

medianT1 T2 … TA

P85
…

PN
…

spectrum
excerpts

Excerpt-Selection…

seed template

iterative adaptation

adapted template

Figure 1. Overview of template-adaptation method: The template is the power spectrum in the time-frequency domain.
This method adapts the single seed template to the corresponding drum sounds appearing in an actual musical piece. The
method is based on an iterative adaptation algorithm, which successively applies two stages — the Excerpt-Selection stage
and the Template-Refinement stage — to obtain the adapted template.
kind of drums: the method does not require a large
database of drum sounds. To identify bass and snare
drums, for example, we should prepare just twoseed-templates (i.e., prepare a single example foreach drum sound).
• The template-matching method is developed to
identify all the onset times of drum sound after thisadaptation. It uses a new distance measure that canfind all the drum sounds in the piece by using theadapted templates.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. First,
Section 2 and 3 describe the template-adaptation andtemplate-matching methods respectively to identify bass
and snare drum sounds. Next, Section 4 shows experimental results of evaluating those methods. In addition,
it demonstrates an example of the drum sound description
by using drum descriptors defined in the standard MPEG7 format. Finally, Section 5 summarizes this paper.

adaptation method of Zils et al. [23] worked only in thetime domain because they defined templates consisting ofaudio signals. Extending their idea, we define templates inthe time-frequency domain because non-harmonic sounds
like drum sounds are well characterized by the shapes ofpower spectrum. Our template-adaptation method uses asingle base template called “seed template” for each kindof drums. To identify bass and snare drums, for example, we require just two seed templates, each of which isindividually adapted by the method.
Our method is based on an iterative adaptation algorithm. An overview of the method is depicted in Figure 1. First, the Rough-Onset-Detection stage roughly
detects onset candidates in the audio signal of a musicalpiece. Starting from each of them, a spectrum excerpt is
extracted from the power spectrum. Then, by using all
the spectrum excerpts and the seed template of each drumsound, the iterative algorithm successively applies twostages — the Excerpt-Selection and Template-Refinement
stages — to obtain the adapted template.

2. TEMPLATE ADAPTATION METHOD
In this paper, templates of drum sounds are the power
spectrum in the time-frequency domain. The promising

1. The Excerpt-Selection stage calculates the distance
between the template (either the seed template or
the intermediate template that is in the middle ofadaptation) and each of the spectrum excerpts byusing a specially-designed distance measure. The
spectrum excerpts of a certain fixed ratio to thewhole are selected by ascending order with respect
to the distances.
2. The Template-Refinement stage then updates the
template by replacing it with the median of the selected excerpts. The template is thus adapted to thecurrent piece and used for the next iteration.
Each iteration consists of these two stages and the iterationis repeated until the adapted template converges.
2.1. Rough Onset Detection
The Rough-Onset-Detection stage is necessary to reducethe computational cost of the two stages in the iteration. It
makes it possible to extract a spectrum excerpt that starts
from not every frame but every onset time. The detectedrough onset times do not necessarily correspond to the actual onsets of drum sounds: they just indicate that somesounds might occur at those times.
When the power increase is high enough, the method
judges that there is an onset time. Let P (t, f ) denote thepower spectrum at frame t and frequency f and Q(t, f )be the its time differential. At every frame (441 points),
P (t, f ) is calculated by applying the STFT with Hanningwindows (4096 points) to the input signal sampled at 44.1
kHz. The rough onset times are then detected as follows:
1. If ∂P (t, f )/∂t > 0 is satisfied for three consecutive
frames (t = a − 1, a, a + 1), Q(a, f ) is defined as∂P (t, f )Q(a, f ) =
.
∂t
t=a

(1)

Otherwise, Q(a, f ) = 0.
2. At every frame t, the weighted summation S(t) of
Q(t, f ) is calculated byS(t) =

2048
X

F (f ) Q(t, f ),

(2)

f =1

where F (f ) is a function of lowpass filter that is determined as shown in Figure 2 according to the frequency characteristics of typical bass or snare drumsounds.
3. Each onset time is given by the peak time found bypeak-picking in S(t). S(t) is smoothed by the Savitzky and Golay’s smoothing method [19] before its
peak time is calculated.
2.2. Seed Template and Spectrum Excerpt
Preparation
Seed template TS , which is a spectrum excerpt preparedfor each of bass and snare drums, is created from audio
signal of an example of that drum sound, which must be
monophonic (solo tone). By applying the same method

pass ratioF( f )

1.0

0

100

200

frequency bin f

Figure 2. Function of the lowpass filter according to thefrequency characteristics of typical bass and snare drums.
with the Rough-Onset-Detection stage, an onset time in
the audio signal is detected. Starting from the onset time,
TS is extracted from the STFT power spectrum of the signal. TS is represented as a time-frequency matrix whose
element is denoted as TS (t, f ) (1 ≤ t ≤ 15 [frames], 1 ≤f ≤ 2048 [bins]). In the iterative adaptation algorithm, atemplate being adapted after g-th iterations is denoted as
Tg . Because TS is the first template, T0 is set to TS .
On the other hand, spectrum excerpt Pi is extracted
starting from each detected onset time oi (i = 1, · · · , N )[ms] in the current musical piece. N is the number of thedetected onsets in the piece. The spectrum excerpt Pi isalso represented as a time-frequency matrix whose size issame with the template Tg .
We also obtain T́g and Ṕi from the power spectrum
weighted by the lowpass filter F (f ):T́g (t, f ) =F (f ) Tg (t, f ),(3)Ṕi (t, f ) =F (f ) Pi (t, f ).

(4)

Because the time resolution of the onset times roughly
estimated is 10 [ms] (441 points), it is not enough to obtainhigh-quality adapted templates. We therefore adjust eachrough onset time oi [ms] to obtain more accurate spectrum
excerpt Pi extracted from adjusted onset time o′i [ms]. If
the spectrum excerpt from oi − 5 [ms] or oi + 5 [ms] isbetter than that from oi [ms], o′i [ms] is set to the time
providing the better spectrum excerpt as follows:
1. The following is calculated for j = −5, 0, 5.
(a) Let Pi,j be a spectrum excerpt extracted fromoi + j [ms]. Note that the STFT power spectrum should be calculated again for oi + j[ms].
(b) The correlation Corr(j) between the template
Tg and the excerpt Pi,j is calculated asCorr(j) =15 2048
X
X

T́g (t, f ) Ṕi,j (t, f ),(5)

t=1 f =1

where Ṕi,j (t, f ) = F (f ) Pi,j (t, f ).
2. The best index J is determined as index j that maximizes Corr(j).
J = argmax Corr(j).
j

3. Pi is determined as Pi,J .

(6)

largesmall

Large Distancespectrum excerpt
including target drum soundfrequency

power

seed template

split to blocks

power

frequency
Small Distancesmall

power summation in block

frequency

Figure 3. Our improved log-spectral distance measure to
calculate the appropriate distance (quantization at a lower
frequency resolution).
frequency

15frames

…

5bins
0

2frames

power summationin unit2048bins

frame

Figure 4. Our implementation of the quantization at alower time-frequency resolution for our improved logspectral distance measure.
2.3. Excerpt Selection
To select a set of spectrum excerpts that are similar to theintermediate template Tg , we propose an improved logspectral distance measure as shown in Figure 3. The spectrum excerpts whose distance from the template is smaller
than a threshold are selected. The threshold is determinedso that the ratio of the number of selected excerpts to thetotal number is a certain value. We cannot use a normal
log-spectral distance measure because it is too sensitive tothe difference of spectral peak positions. Our improved
log-spectral distance measure uses two kinds of the distance Di — Di for the first iteration (g = 0) and Di forthe other iterations (g ≥ 1) — to robustly calculate theappropriate distance even if frequency components of thesame drum may vary during a piece.
The distance Di for the first iteration are calculated after quantizing Tg and Pi at a lower time-frequency resolution. As is shown in Figure 4, the time and frequency
resolution after the quantization is 2 [frames] (20 [ms])+frequency

power

small

+ … +

=

power
Figure 5. Updating the template by calculating the median of selected spectrum excerpts.
and 5 [bins] (54 [Hz]), respectively. The distance Di between Tg (TS ) and Pi is defined asv
u15/2 2048/5
uX X 2uT̂g (t̂, fˆ) − P̂i (t̂, fˆ)(g = 0), (7)Di = tt̂=1fˆ=1where the quantized (smoothed) spectrum T̂g (t̂, fˆ) andP̂i (t̂, fˆ) are defined as
5fˆ
2t̂
X
X
ˆ
T̂g (t̂, f ) =T́g (t, f ),(8)
t=2t̂−1 f =5fˆ−4P̂i (t̂, fˆ) =

2t̂
X

ˆ

5f
X

Ṕi (t, f ).

(9)

t=2t̂−1 f =5fˆ−4

On the other hand, the distance Di for the iterations after the first iteration is calculated by the following normal
log-spectral distance measure:v
u 15 2048 
2uX X
Di = tT́g (t, f ) − Ṕi (t, f )(g ≥ 1). (10)t=1 f =1

2.4. Template Refinement
As is shown in Figure 5, the median of all the selected
spectrum excerpts is calculated and the updated (refined)
template Tg+1 is obtained by
Tg+1 (t, f ) = median Ps (t, f ),s

(11)where Ps (s = 1, · · · , M ) are spectrum excerpts selectedin the Excerpt-Selection stage.
We use the median operation because it can suppress
frequency components that do not belong to drum sounds.
Since major original frequency components of a target
drum sound can be expected to appear at the same positions in most selected spectrum excerpts, they are preserved after the median operation. On the other hand, frequency components of other musical instrument sounds
do not always appear at similar positions in the selected
spectrum excerpts. When the median is calculated at t
and f , those unnecessary frequency components become
outliers and can be suppressed. We can thus obtain the
drum-sound template adapted to the current musical pieceeven if it contains simultaneous sounds of various instruments.

P19

frequency

P1

power yes

…

P30

P31

…

yes

P47
…

no

Does each excerpt
include the template ?

yes

TA

Weight-Function-Generation
characteristic
pointsadapted template

P62
…

yes

P85
…

no

PN
spectrum
excerpts

…

yes

yes

Loudness-Adjustment
Distance-Calculation

excerpt P47
template TA
excerpt that includes template
excerpt P62

template TA

excerpt that does not include template

Figure 6. Overview of template-matching method: This method matches the adapted template with all spectrum excerpts
by using the improved Goto’s distance measure to detect all the actual onset times. Our distance measure can judge
whether the adapted template is included in spectrum excerpts even if there are other simultaneous sounds.

3. TEMPLATE MATCHING METHOD
By using the template adapted to the current musicalpiece, this method finds all temporal locations where atargeted drum occurs in the piece: it tries to exhaustively find all onset times of the target drum sound. This
template-matching problem is difficult because sounds ofother musical instruments often overlap the drum sounds
corresponding to the adapted template. Even if the target drum sound is included in a spectrum excerpt, the distance between the adapted template and the excerpt becomes large when using most typical distance measures.
To solve this problem, we propose a new distance measure that is based on the distance measure proposed byGoto and Muraoka [5]. Our distance measure can judge
whether the adapted template is included in spectrum excerpts even if there are other simultaneous sounds. This
judgment is based on characteristic points of the adapted
template in the time-frequency domain.
An overview of our method is depicted in Figure 6.
First, the Weight-Function-Generation stage prepares aweight function which represents spectral characteristic
points of the adapted template. Next, the LoudnessAdjustment stage calculates the loudness difference between the template and each spectrum excerpt by using theweight function. If the loudness difference is larger than athreshold, it judges that the target drum sound does not appear in that excerpt, and does not execute the subsequent
processing. If the difference is not too large, the loudnessof each spectrum excerpt is adjusted to compensate forthe loudness difference. Finally, the Distance-Calculation
stage calculates the distance between the adapted template and each adjusted spectrum excerpt. If the distanceis smaller than a threshold, it judges that that excerpt includes the target drum sound.
3.1. Weight Function Generation
A weight function represents the magnitude of spectral
characteristic at each frame t and frequency f in theadapted template. The weight function w is defined asw(t, f ) = F (f ) TA (t, f ),(12)

where TA is the adapted template and F (f ) is the lowpass filter function depicted in Figure 2.
3.2. Loudness Adjustment
The loudness of each spectrum excerpt is adjusted to thatof the adapted template TA . This is required by our
template-matching method: if the loudness is different,
our method cannot estimate the appropriate distance between a spectrum excerpt and the adapted template because it cannot judge whether the spectrum excerpt includes the adapted template.
To calculate the loudness difference between the spectrum excerpt Pi and the template TA , we focus on spectral characteristic points of TA in the time-frequency domain. First, spectral characteristic points (frequencies) ateach frame are determined by using the weight function w,
and the power difference ηi at each spectral characteristic

3.3. Distance Calculation

TA

…

power

The distance between the adapted template TA and theadjusted spectrum excerpt Pi′ is calculated by using an
extended version of the Goto’s distance measure [5]. If
Pi′ (t, f ) is larger than TA (t, f ) — i.e., Pi′ (t, f ) includes
TA (t, f ), Pi′ (t, f ) can be considered a mixture of frequency components of not only the targeted drum but also
other musical instruments. We thus define the distancemeasure asn 0 (P ′ (t, f ) − T (t, f ) ≥ Ψ) ,Aiγi (t, f ) =(18)
1 otherwise,
where γi (t, f ) is the local distance between TA and Pi′
at t and f . The negative constant Ψ makes this distancemeasure robust for the small variation of frequency components. If Pi′ (t, f ) is larger than about TA (t, f ), γi (t, f )becomes zero.
The total distance Γi is calculated by integrating γi in
the time-frequency domain, weighted by the function w:

frequency

frame

t
…

Pi

TA

L ηi (t , f t ,12 ) Lη i (t , f t ,5 ) Lηi (t , f t ,1 ) L
the power differences at characteristic pointsδ i (t )the first quantile

the power difference at frame

t

Γi =

point is calculated. Next, the power difference δi at eachframe is calculated by using ηi at that frame, as is shown in
Figure 7. If the power of Pi is too much smaller than thatof TA , the method judges that Pi does not include TA , anddoes not proceed with the following processing. Finally,
the total power difference ∆i is calculated by integrating
δi . The algorithm is described as follows:
1. Let ft,k (k = 1, · · · , 15) be the characteristic pointsof the adapted template. ft,k represents a frequency
where w(t, ft,k ) is the k-th largest at frame t. The
power difference ηi (t, ft,k ) is calculated as(13)

2. The power difference δi (t) at frame t is determinedas the first quantile of ηi (t, ft,k ).
δi (t) =first-quantile ηi (t, ft,k ),

(14)

k

Ki (t) =arg first-quantile ηi (t, ft,k ). (15)k

If the number of frames where δi (t) ≤ Ψ is satisfied
is larger than threshold Rδ , we judge that TA is notincluded in Pi (Ψ is a negative constant).
3. The total power difference ∆i is calculated asP{t|δ (t)>Ψ} δi (t) w(t, ft,Ki (t) )∆i = P i.
(16){t|δi (t)>Ψ} w(t, ft,Ki (t) )If ∆i ≤ Θ∆ is satisfied, we judge that TA is notincluded in Pi (Θ∆ is a threshold). Let Pi′ be an
adjusted spectrum excerpt after the loudness adjustment, determined as
Pi′ (t, f ) = Pi (t, f ) − ∆i .

w(t, f ) γi (t, f ).

(19)

t=1 f =1

Figure 7. Calculating the power difference δi (t) at eachframe t, determined as the first quantile of ηi (t, ft,k ).

ηi (t, ft,k ) = Pi (t, ft,k ) − TA (t, ft,k ).

15 2048
XX(17)

To determine whether the targeted drum played at Pi′ ,distance Γi is compared with threshold ΘΓ . If Γi < ΘΓ issatisfied, we judge that the targeted drum played.
4. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS
Drum sound identification for polyphonic musical audio
signals was performed to evaluate the accuracy of identifying bass and snare drums by our proposed method. In
addition, we demonstrate an example of the drum sounddescription by means of drum descriptors in MPEG-7.
4.1. Experimental Conditions
We tested our method on excerpts of ten songs includedin the popular music database RWC-MDB-P-2001 developed by Goto et al. [6]. Each excerpt was takenfrom the first minute of a song. The songs we used included sounds of vocals and various instruments as songsin commercial CDs do. Seed templates were createdfrom solo tones included in the musical instrument sounddatabase RWC-MDB-I-2001 [7]: the seed templates ofbass and snare drums are created from sound files named
421BD1N3.WAV and 422SD5N3.WAV respectively. Alldata were sampled at 44.1 kHz with 16 bits.
We evaluated the experimental results by the recall rate,
the precision rate and the F-measure:recall rate=

precision rate=

F-measure=the number of correctly detected onsets,

the number of actual onsets
the number of correctly detected onsets
the number of onsets detected by matching
2 · recall rate · precision rate
recall rate + precision rate.

To prepare actual onset times (correct answers), we extracted onset times of bass and snare drums from the standard MIDI file of each piece, and adjusted them to thepiece by hands.

,

piecenumber
No. 6
No. 11
No. 18
No. 20No. 30No. 44
No. 47
No. 50No. 52
No. 61averagemethod
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt
base
adapt

recall rate
26 % (28/110)
57 % (63/110)
54 % (28/52)
100 % (52/52)
26 % (35/134)
97 % (130/134)
95 % (60/63)
94 % (59/63)
19 % (25/130)
93 % (121/130)
6 % (6/99)
93 % (92/99)
77 % (46/60)
93 % (56/60)
92 % (61/66)
97 % (64/66)
86 % (113/131)
94 % (123/131)
96 % (73/76)
93 % (71/76)
51.6 % (475/951)
90.2 % (831/921)

bass drum
precision rate
68 % (28/41)
84 % (63/75)
100 % (28/28)
100 % (52/52)
100 % (35/35)
71 % (130/183)
100 % (60/60)
100 % (59/59)
89 % (25/28)
94 % (121/129)
100 % (6/6)
100 % (92/92)
98 % (46/47)
98 % (56/57)
94 % (61/65)
88 % (64/73)
96 % (113/118)
90 % (123/136)
100 % (73/73)
100 % (71/71)
94.8 % (475/501)
90.0 % (831/927)

F-measure
0.37
0.68
0.70
1.00
0.41
0.82
0.98
0.97
0.31
0.93
0.11
0.96
0.86
0.96
0.93
0.92
0.90
0.92
0.98
0.97
0.67
0.90

recall rate
83 % (52/63)
100 % (63/63)
27 % (10/37)
95 % (35/37)
91 % (122/134)
76 % (102/134)
24 % (15/63)
78 % (49/63)
27 % (19/70)
100 % (70/70)
9 % (7/80)
68 % (54/80)
41 % (21/51)
88 % (45/51)
94 % (102/108)
67 % (72/108)
97 % (76/78)
90 % (70/78)
99 % (66/67)
99 % (66/67)
65.2 % (490/751)
83.4 % (626/751)

snare drum
precision rate
83 % (52/61)
97 % (63/65)
71 % (10/14)
92 % (35/38)
82 % (122/148)
94 % (102/109)
94 % (15/16)
91 % (49/54)
90 % (19/21)
96 % (70/73)
88 % (7/8)
89 % (54/61)
70 % (21/30)
75 % (45/60)
89 % (102/114)
96 % (72/77)
94 % (76/81)
97 % (70/72)
80 % (66/83)
100 % (66/66)
84.6 % (490/579)
92.7 % (626/675)

F-measure
0.83
0.98
0.33
0.93
0.86
0.84
0.38
0.84
0.42
0.98
0.16
0.77
0.52
0.81
0.92
0.78
0.96
0.93
0.88
0.99
0.74
0.88

Table 1. Experimental results of drum sound identification for ten musical pieces in RWC-MDB-P-2001.
identified drum
(method)bass drum (base)bass drum (adapt)snare drum (base)snare drum (adapt)Rδ[frames]
7
7
7
7

Ψ
[dB]
-10
-10
-10
-10

Θ∆
[dB]
1
-10
-5
-7

ΘΓ
5000
5000
5000
5000

Table 2. Thresholds used in four experimental settings.
4.2. Results of Drum Sound Identification
Table 1 shows the experimental results of comparing our
template-adaptation-and-matching methods (called adapt
method) with a method in which the template-adaptation
method was disabled (called base method); the basemethod used a seed template instead of the adapted one forthe template matching. In other words, we conducted four
experiments in different settings; the identification of bass
drum by the base or adapt method and that of snare drumby the base or adapt method. We used different thresholds shown in Table 2 among four experimental cases to
product the best results in respective case.
These results showed the effectiveness of the adapt
method: the template-adaptation method improved the Fmeasure of identifying bass drum from 0.67 to 0.90 andthat of identifying snare drum from 0.74 to 0.88 on average of the ten pieces. In fact, in our observation, thetemplate-adaptation method absorbed the difference of thetimber by correctly adapting seed templates to actual drumsounds appearing in a piece.
In many musical pieces, the recall rate was significantly improved in the adapt method. The base method
often detected a few onsets in some piece (e.g., No. 11 andNo. 30) because the distance between an unadapted seed
template and spectrum excerpts were not appropriate; thedistance became too large because of the difference of thetimber. On the other hand, the template-matching methodof the adapt method worked effectively; all the rates in
No. 11 and No. 30, for example, were over 90% in theadapt method. If the difference of the timber is small, thebase method produced the high recall and precision rates(e.g., No. 52 and No. 61).
Although our adapt method is effective in general, it
caused a low recall rate in a few cases. The recall rateof identifying the snare drum in No. 50, for example,
was degraded, while the precision rate was improved. In
this piece, the template-matching method was not able tojudge that the template was correctly included in spectrum
excerpts because frequency components of the bass guitar
often overlapped spectral characteristic points of the bass
drum in those excerpts.
4.3. Demonstration of Drum Sound Description
In this section, we demonstrate an example of the automatic drum sound description by using drum descriptors.
Our proposed template-adaptation and template-matching
methods can detect onset times of bass and snare drums
respectively. To symbolically represent these information in the context of MPEG-7, drum descriptors and theirschemes must be defined in the MPEG-7 format.
First, we define drum descriptors and drum descriptor
schemes. To describe onset times and names of drums,
we use the mpeg7:MediaTimePoint data type and the Enumeration facet respectively:

6. REFERENCES<simpleType name="InstrumentNameType"><restriction base="string"><enumeration value="BassDrum"/><enumeration value="SnareDrum"/>...
</restriction></simpleType><complexType name="InstrumentOnsetType"><sequence><element name="MediaTimePoint"
type="mpeg7:MediaTimePointType"/><element name="InstrumentName"
type="InstrumentNameType"/></sequence></complexType><complexType name="InstrumentStreamType"><sequence><element name="InstrumentOnset"
minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/></sequence></complexType>where the InstrumentOnsetType data type indicates information of a time and a name which corresponds to a onset
in a musical piece. The InstrumentStreamType data typeis a set of multiple InstrumentOnsetType elements.
Next, we describe onset times and names of drums ina musical piece by means of drum descriptors defined
above. We demonstrate an example of the drum sounddescription for No. 52 by using our proposed methods.
<element name="DrumStream" type="InstrumentStreamType"/><DrumStream><InstrumentOnset><MediaTimePoint>T00:00:36382F44100</MediaTimePoint><InstrumentName>BassDrum</InstrumentName></InstrumentOnset><InstrumentOnset><MediaTimePoint>T00:00:54684F44100</MediaTimePoint><InstrumentName>SnareDrum</InstrumentName></InstrumentOnset><InstrumentOnset><MediaTimePoint>T00:01:22506F44100</MediaTimePoint><InstrumentName>BassDrum</InstrumentName></InstrumentOnset>...
</DrumStream>

5. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented an automatic description
system that can describe onset times and names of drumsby means of drum descriptors. Our system used two methods to identify all the onset times of bass and snare drums
respectively in real-world CD recordings. Even if drumsounds prepared as seed templates are different from ones
used in a musical piece, our template-adaption method canadapt the templates to the piece. By using the adapted
templates, our template-matching method then detects all
the onset times. Our experimental results have shown thatthe adaptation method largely improved the F-measure ofidentifying bass and snare drums. In addition, we defined
drum descriptors in the context of MPEG-7 and demonstrated the automatic drum sound description for a realworld musical piece. In the future, we plan to use multiple seed templates for each kind of drums and extend our
method to identify other drum sounds.
Acknowledgments
This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Grantin-Aid for Scientific Research (A), No.15200015, and COE program of MEXT, Japan.

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